In the dog eat dog society of America as we know it, there seems to be a decline in morals
to such an extent that all that is important is material objects.
What got me to thinking
this way was a news short that I watched on Yahoo news recently. An elderly actress was being interviewed and questioned as to how
she had aged so gracefully. After hemming and hawing about the subject, she finally mentioned that she had been able to take care
of her body over time and encouraged younger women to “always put on your lipstick”! She did not mention the fact that she had been
endowed at birth with a great gene pool and that she had never had to do any real work throughout her entire life. Most American women
have to work for a living.
I got to thinking about what she really meant by “always put
on your lipstick”! I found this statement to be very shallow coming from a very talented actress, one who is supposed to be highly
educated. My conclusion is: she has either gotten senile in her senior years, or, she really feels that looking good in one’s body
is what is truly important.
Somehow Hollywood has convinced all our young people that they
must wear the best designer clothes, the most expensive shoes, eat at the restaurants that are suggested in the movies, and drive
a Mercedes Benz automobile while smoking the most expensive brand of cigarette. What ever happened to being healthy and happy inside?
Who are we trying to impress?
Growing up in the backwoods coal mining regions of
Virginia, folks didn’t have time for trying to preserve their looks. Our hygiene consisted of a bath a week, brushing our teeth with
baking soda, and changing our pants once a week with a change of shirts every three days. Grandpa used to call perfume ‘stink pretty’!
Most of us stunk, ‘not so pretty’ when you consider the humid conditions of Virginia and the lack of bathing in those days. Coal miners
had to bathe every day, or at least their exposed parts. By the time the bath was over, the water was blacker than the coal dust they
had just washed off. You can bet our mothers did not encourage us to bathe in the same water. Besides that, water was scarce where
I was raised. Baking soda was the only deodorant we had. Vinegar was a substitute, but who wanted to go around smelling like a salad?
Advertisers have practically ruined the youth of America. What with their, “It’s what’s
up front that counts” to encourage the smoking of cigarettes laden with nicotine. Or, “a thinking man’s filter, a smoking man’s taste!”
encouraged young people to smoke that brand of cigarette. What they did not realize, until their peers began having cancer, that the
nicotine was not the problem. It was the smoke with the tar that was clogging up the sacs of their lungs. The nicotine was what got
them hooked! Remember, this is American companies leading the youth of our country to death. What an awful shame!
Another way that
Advertisers have outright deceived the youth of America is by saying, “Drink this alcohol and you will have life, and be the life
of the party”! They did not tell them that drinking alcohol led to siroccos of the liver. Also, they did not tell them that Alcohol
is one of the main causes of heart disease.
What foolish sheep we have been to follow every
avenue leading to our demise instead of doing the things that would lead us to a more comfortable life. Isn’t it time that we took
back our bodies? Isn’t it time that we accept each other just as we were created without having to try and out do the Creator? That
is essentially what we are doing when we put tons of chemical makeup on our faces, wear the most expensive lipstick, drink the most
advertised alcohol, and smoke the latest craze in tobacco. We are saying that somebody made a big mistake! We are not born with any
of those foreign objects in our chemical make-up!

Some folks are so shallow now,
They’ll swallow most anything!
If they’re told,
“jump off a cliff,
It’ll help you all to sing.”

“Rub this type of acid on,
To clean the pores of your skin!”
There’d be folks
standing in line
To assure their beauty then!

When will people awaken
To one real important fact?
It’s not what’s on the outside,
That keeps our person’s intact!

If ‘putting on lipstick’ is what makes life important, I suppose we all better go out and buy
us a tube.